Law's Edge
by Tobias Corvinus
Summary: A corpse with an Inquistorial Rosette inspires many questions. None matter more than what killed him. The Arbites do not interfere with the Inquisition, but Detectives understand that upholding the Lex Imperialis requires working in the gray area between heresy and necessity. Nothing is grayer than the world under the hive spires. Welcome to Level 2217. Welcome to the Edge.
1. Chapter 1

**Hive Primus -** **Level 2223**

Patroller Daro Munds pulled his nose filters out with a faint sigh. Stuffing them carelessly into an outer pocket of his fog coat he leaned against the guard rail and breathed in the putrid reek of the industrial cavern. The dank chem-fogs pressed in close as he fished a cig-stick out of his fogcoat's deep pockets and his beat-partner-cum-protégé made a _tch_ of disapproval. "One of those days you're going to lean on the wrong rail."

"Perk of experience." Daro retorted. The cig stick flicked alive and his words hissed out with greasy black smoke. "I know every single rail from Hightower to the Edge itself. This one won't pop for another hundred years."

This rail, the one on 2223 was a good rail. It overlooked the stepped mesa of the levels below it, on days when the ventilators did their jobs properly you could even catch a glimpse of the far down waste-lake, with its deadly-beautiful rainbow shimmered oil. After a minute, Patroller Keller cautiously joined him. She leaned tentatively on the thick rail, ready to spring back from a moment's notice of shifting gravity. It kind of rendered the relaxation of leaning mute, but on the other hand, that deep-rooted caution would probably ensure she at least reached Daro's elderly years of fifty-six.

They looked out together at the levels below them, and then Keller frowned. "Daro. Look."

A light was winking far below them, a steady pattern. All the patrollers had vox-beads but the damn things were static half the time. Lights were more reliable and anyone could memorize the basic two short, one long repeat. Daro sighed. If he turned his head just a little, the signal light disappeared from his periphery.

Trouble was, a shiner like that meant someone was trying to relay a message up to the patroller outpost on 2240, and since their vox-beads weren't crackling it meant that once again someone was asleep at the observation port or smoking a cig out back instead. Daro checked his chrono and frowned. There were only three-quarters of an hour left on the patrol. This was usually the point where they turned around and began the long climb back up to the barracks on 2240 to sign in their vox-beads and fog coats. But if they'd seen it there was a chance other patrollers had seen it too and if someone bothered to check they'd wonder why Darro and Keller hadn't investigated and that'd be a whole shitload of annoyance.

 _No help for it._ Daro scowled. "Keller, one day, those sharp eyes are going to see something they shouldn't," he grumped, "And then I'll have to find myself a new lackey."

Keller spared him a quick flash of mostly white teeth from a coffee-color skin that was starting to gray without sunlight **.** She was short, features plain, unadorned save for a slight bump on her nose.

Maybe if he'd been ten years younger…Daro smiled to himself. _Twenty years younger, and a lot less jaded._ He dragged on the cig, relishing the dryness as the smoke cleared out the wetness in his lungs, then Daro carefully pinched the cig out with his singed glove and tucked it back deep under the fogcoat. It was a promise to himself that there'd be a _later_ to smoke it in, and it was a luck-gesture Daro never failed to follow anytime he had to venture close to the Edge.

"Feck, let's get this over with."He hissed out the last plume of smoke and screwed his nose-plugs back in, inhaling sharply on the gummy masses to fit the foam tightly to his nostrils. They descended the stairs to quadruple-two. The rocky slabs were thick, pitted with age, patinaed with corrosives from the fogs that rolled in whenever the ventilators kacked up.

The lights of the Plunge grew closer. Neon fogs and glaring halogen slashes mingled with lurid swirls of dim lights and deep shadows. Figures passed them, marked only by the muffled echos of boots or bare feet on the concrete. Some moved quickly, darting from lamp-light to lamp-light, others lurked in doorways or curled up for protection under flimsy sheets of plastek.

 _Pop-pop-crack-pop._

"Stubbers," Keller murmured absently. Daro nodded, he heard it too, but the staccato pops were small, faraway arguments, just drifting across the chasm from the network of metal islands and cable that made up the scraptown Clog in the middle of the Plunge. They both ignored it.

The fog thickened. It swirled from their feet up to their thighs. Then their waists. Its wet vapors tingled Daro's bare skin and Keller strapped her collar up, forming a leather bulwark that encircled past her nose, left only her goggled eyes visible under the brim of her cap. Daro drew his lumen rod into his left hand. On a fog night like this the light would just backscatter but the casing was nice and thick and it'd cracked the skulls of plenty of muckers looking for a mark and figuring hiding in a foggy alley was a good way to get the drop.

Keller, Daro was amused to note, had finally "misplaced" her laspistol. Daro didn't know whose bright idea it'd been to assign lasweapons to patrollers doing foot-beats in the underspire levels of the hive. The most prevalent theory was some long ago Adminstratum typo that'd never been corrected and overtime come to be regarded as holy-writ.

Sure laspistols were supposed to be reliable, but reliable didn't have a fair chance down here in the shadow of the Plunge. Millions of tons of waste-water poured out of the manufactorums above their heads. The humid vapors traveled for hundreds of miles up and laced everything with their corrosive taint, metals and glass especially. A laspistol out of its holster for an entire patrol was a laspistol that needed to be field-stripped and checked for corrosion lest the next time you pull the trigger it did nothing but flash like a glorified flashlight with a pistol-grip.

There was a mucker out on the Clog who made knock-offs of Imperial Naval autopistols out of his back-alley forge. His pieces were big and blocky, but they were also reliable and didn't have focusing lenses that would cloud up under the persistent corrosive tainted mists.

The rush of the falls grew louder. The smooth rockcrete wall began to sprout pipes and ceramic tubes as they neared one of the outlets and the pattern lights flashed. Daro pressed into the alcove offered by a vertical stack of pipes. He felt the faint vibration of thousands of gallons of liquid thrusting through its hollow interior and he peered carefully into the gloom.

The light flashed again and this time Daro could make out the shiner. A dredger was crouched by the top of a corrugated stairwell like a gas-mask scarecrow swaddled in an ill-fitting tarnished yellow chem-coat. He – Daro assumed it was a he – jerked back, posture flinching. as the two patrollers materialized out of the fog. Unlike the dredger, the patrollers were practically invisible in their gray fogcoats on a night like this.

Something unintelligible whistled out through the dredger's gas mask. The figure paused, smacked his tubes a few times, freeing some organic particulates and rust, and tried again. _"Got a floater."_ His voice crackled out through the corroded filter and Daro recognized it.

"Shew you reek-bastard, don't tell me you hauled us down here for another work-serf got himself flushed." It was an all too common occurrence. The manufactorums above the Plunge were always double-shifting. With a tithe coming up, accidents were a bored tragedy a second.

" _No."_ Shew said. His rubber mask with the insect lenses wobbled and shook, _"No, no."_

"Then what is it? Manufactorum administrator take a plunge? Some Guard recruiter bastard got himself thrown out of the wrong sog-den? What?"

" _Don't know, couldn't peek. Falg peeked-got pale, rapped out go up and shiner some boots."_ The light was jittering from his signal-lamp. His hands were shaking.

Daro eyed Shew carefully. Dredgers spent most their lives in the cramped tunnels, un-clogging waste pipes and exhaust channels. Lot of them found the open vast void of the cavern downright terrifying. It could be Shew was just on edge because he was outside. Or it could be some ganger fresh off the Clog looking to lure some patrollers and they squeezed Shew to be the baiter.

Daro exchanged a glance with Keller. _Only one way to find out._ He squeezed the grip on his autopistol tighter and nodded, "Show us what you got then."

Shew didn't need any further prompting. One hand slapped the signal lamp onto its harness clip the other grabbed up a shortened auto-delver, and the third grabbed a rail and swung the abhuman out of sight. Shew was dredger stock. His ancestors had been dredgers too. Like most people who spent days working the thickly toxic brew of the waste tunnels, human abnormality was common and expected.

Vertical stacks of stairs studded the outside walls, thick, patched, rusted iron that creaked and groaned under three pairs of tromping boots. Nobody liked taking the Iron Steps, but they were quicker than traversing the entire length of each level before reaching the solid rockcrete slabs down to the next level and the dredger took them quickly down.

After several turns, Shew led them away from the outside edge and led the way deeper into a narrow service corridor cut into the rockface. Claustrophobia replaced agoraphobia as the two enforcers bent and contorted their way through the tangle of pipes that sprouted along the walls and ceiling. In places the rockcrete floor gave way to thick metal grilles and Daro could hear the rush of the water thundering inches below his boots. Faded yellow and white paint signs warned them they were entering the wetworks proper and needed to be properly equipped.

Keller paused and strapped on her filter mask. Daro didn't bother. Those things might've kept the lungs cleanish, and in her case, the chances of making baby Shews with third arms or quadruple eyes low, but they obstructed your sight and your hearing, and the thick rubber did nothing to stop a bullet you didn't see because your vision had been reduced to a small fish-eye view right in front of your face.

The smell of wet oil got stronger and mixed with that suffocating reek of decomposing organic matter. Daro jammed his nose-filters tighter into his nostrils as they came out into a narrow concrete walkway. To their left, the tunnel was a massive curve of piping, hosing a river of water-diluted waste down to the Big Plunge. Lumin lights flickered weakly on the overhead ceiling like dying stars. The line of railing bordering the left side of the walkway broke up ahead, making way for a narrow metal ladder. There was another yellow cloaked figure up ahead. A taller dredger, standing nervous sentry with an auto-delver gripped like a spear.

Shew rushed ahead and swung down the ladder. Daro slowed, peering carefully over the lip. The ladder extended down ten feet to a concrete landing set inches above the raging river torrent. A collection of filth-stained yellow coats marked the rest of the dredgers. They were gathered over a four-limbed lump spread out on a tattered tarp like mourners at a funeral.

 _Or buzzards over carrion,_ the patroller thought. One of the dredgers had their mask off. Falg's acid-misted face turned back to regard Daro. He was chewing a fresh blister into his fat lip and his tense expression didn't set right on such a big broad face. "Daro." The dredger leader said.

"Falg." Daro grunted.

Pleasantries exchanged, Falg jerked his head. "The floater's this way."

Daro sighed heavily, "Let's see it then."

Daro climbed down the rusted ladder. Keller stayed up top and leaned onto the rail with a _clank_ that drew attention to the big autopistol held casually in her hand and just as casually just how vivid a target those yellow-coats made the dredger. Daro hid another smile. She was learning all right. Feeling a little more reassured he turned his attention to the sorry bastard on the sheet.

The body was male…ish. It was hard to tell based more on the width of the hips and the breadth of the shoulders, corrosives had eaten away at the face, rinsing away flesh and muscle. One eye remained in the socket, a cloudy blue. The body wore a form-fitting body suit. The suit hung limp now but a quick eyeballing of its size suggested someone lithe, tightly compacted. There was a hole in the front and back. High caliber shot to have punched through.

Daro grunted and leaned in closer.

On closer inspection, the remaining eye was faintly whorled with etched metal circuits. Wires instead of nerves anchored it to what fleshy gray matter remained while micro-staples kept it sutured to the discolored skull, a bionic implant.

And the suit itself, a matte-black bodyglove, unremarkable looking, could have been worn by midspire citizen. However, the fact that the clothing was still recognizable, still mostly intact said it was high-quality, _ultra_ high quality to be able to stand up to a wash through the waste-pipes. And that in turn said that whatever had made a mess of the suit's gut was far beyond a banger special loaded with glass and shrap. Even with a hole in it the size of his fist, a tough-woven suit like that would be high-cred to the hired guns and gangers of Downspire, even people in Midspire. Same for the bionic, and there were plenty of sealed zip-heads criss-crossing the body suit that suggested micro-pockets loaded with all sorts of high tech goodies.

"Well Falg, I'd say you've fished a fortune." There weren't many perks to dredging, but one law went unspoken. What dredgers dislodged in the cold darkness of the pipes, they kept. "Looks like some high-spyre adrenaline addict got himself in over his head."

"We didn't know Daro. We didn't know who he was. There was no way we could've known." Falq looked on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Like the mention of profiting off the corpse had just triggered his deepest darkest nightmare because he was emphatically shaking his head _no_ so hard Daro was surprised it was still attached.

"Known _what?_ " Daro growled.

Falg took something out of his pocket. It was a shape swathed heavily in tarp-rags. He handed it to Daro like a man turning in the warrant for his own execution. "We didn't touch a thing after we found it in his pocket. Put everything back. Swear on the Throne."

Starting to get scared, Daro took it reluctantly. He flipped back the rags.

"Oh."

Light reflected off its surface, splashed his face with ruby hues. It was beautiful as a shimmerscale viper coiling around your leg. Daro wanted to turn around, wind his arm, and pitch it as far into the dark river as he could. Even if hours of swirling raging, battering currents of dissolving liquid hadn't scratched it, anything that went over the edge and into the Big Plunge could safely be considered lost forever.

Daro didn't throw it over the edge. For the same reason that Falg hadn't tossed it back in the murk, the same reason his crew had willingly given up a ten-year fortune in salvage. Fear. Fear powerful enough to overcome greed. Fear instilled by years of propaganda voxes, and whispered stories in the late hours at dim sog-dens.

"Daro?" Keller's voice echoed down, "You alright there?"

"Keller…get-" the words choked in his mouth, wet clogs. Daro paused, carefully fished out his cig and lit it. He took a breath, another. "Get this…get it on the horn to the precinct, delegation…" Throne, did they even have a delegation code in the book for this? "Feck, forget the precinct. High Spire, Crimson-Black."

"The Arbites?"

She wasn't slow, just wanted confirmation.

"Yeah…make it the Arbites' problem."

Keller pulled the vox-muffs off her head, whacked them a few times, and strapped it back on.

"Vox-operator's throwing regs at me. Crimson-Black's too high a code to send to the Arbites with having the local enforcement provost approve it first. And local provost Danik is currently indisposed."

"Who's on the wire?"

"Stryger."

"You tell that lazy sack of shit that he'll forget the regs just like I forgot who misfiled the nine kilos of obscura from that chem-pit we busted two spins back. You tell him _that."_

More muffled static, more stern whispers. After a moment she came back around and towards him.

"He said to tell you you're a fecking heartless bastard and he hopes Danik throws you into the Big Plunge." Keller grabbed the ladder and slid down it, landing with a muffled thump on the decking. "So, now's as I've pissed off the mucker responsible for calling in backup if I get in trouble, mind telling me what this is all-" Keller's voice froze. When it worked again, she blurted out _"_ Holy _fecking_ Throne."

Daro stared down at the icon heavy in his hand. The surface was faintly clouded, the only hint of hours or days spent in the acid-bath of the river. The shape remained unmarred, precision sharp angles forming a symbol instantly recognized, instantly feared by any sane man or woman in the Imperium.

A gothic I, bisected by three bars.


	2. Chapter 2

There'd been some trouble at the orbital docks. The outside of the shuttle's hull was patterned with stub rounds and a few burn marks of las. Instead of a carefully generic departure through a civilian transport, Janos had received an encoded vox and a rather visible Arbites Eagle shuttle on approach for 'routine inspection' that really hadn't fooled anyone.

"Simultaneous raids hit all twelve targets as we left. The snatch-teams had a field day." Arbtriator Provost Silas DeLance kept reading the data-slate and his lips curled into amusement. "Master Teedis's shuttle was down for mysterious maintenance. That took a deft touch Janos. They caught him trying to commandeer a plebe's tug."

"So we were able to salvage it then."

Silas nodded. The older Arbitratror's face was lined with age and creased with scars, but his carapace was a glossy black sheen and the honor-tags of his rank shimmered in the shuttle's interior lights.

"It'll take a month at least, and there could be more that we didn't uncover." Silas shrugged, "We still bagged over three hundred for the punishment details. We'll hold the executions for the end of the month."

Janos nodded. He'd only recently had the chance to change back into the Arbites carapace. His bodyglove was rumpled, gray rock dust still salted his hair, and until he reached a facility or vessel with a functioning shower unit he was going to smell like an industrial plant.

For six months he'd been Yedero Tythus, a blandly generic mid-level data-intendent in a merchant guild suspected of being involved in xeno-artifact smuggling. Now, Yedero was dead, just one more cover to be peeled off, one more fabricated life history to be deleted, one more ghost to bury.

It wouldn't be that hard. He'd been doing this for years. Janos looked at Silas and nodded his head, "What about the ones I requested to exempt?"

Silas took the data-slate and scanned it. _Nathis Kerr, Celia Hulletsen and Jeela Hulletsen._

One might believe his friend was indulging in some softness. It was a possibility Silas immediately dismissed. He could just ask Janos _why_ but he'd trained him for ten years. If he couldn't follow his subordinate's mental footsteps then Silas might need to consider retirement.

He knew from Janos's reports that Nathis had been someone Janos had made a habit of frequently interacting with as Yedero Tythus, but the woman and her child were tertiary, at best. A low level retainer – a glorified deck-scrubber really, and her daughter who'd just passed her twelfth name day and second year of indentured training for the honor of loading more fragile guild cargos into their fat-bellied holds.

Silas snorted. Nathis was also one of Master-of-Merchant's Patria's former data-archivists. The rest of the pieces clicked into place.

"Jeela's their illegitimate isn't she? With Teedis out of the way, you want Patria wondering just what information Nathis provided the Arbitrators to buy him and his paramour a stay of execution."

Janos blinked as if to say _what an odd coincidence_ and Silas stifled another snort. "Patria is a matron of one of the most powerful merchant guilds in the system. I doubt she'll impale herself on such an obvious hook."

The younger detective shrugged. "She's going to be paranoid with Teedis snapped up. She'll send someone because she can't afford not to. We hook them, maybe they can link to her."

Silas grunted.

Inside of his Arbites armor, Janos was just another generic chin jutting out from a visored helm. Outside of it, Janos Grenn remained a rather bland man. Not particularly handsome no noteworthy deformities. Above average height, above-average build, a generic face with a blunt jaw and cropped dark hair and slightly darker eyes that seemed to defy more specific colors like _black_ or _brown_.

Even his expressions were watered down. Faint tugs for smiles or frowns, slight narrowings of brows for focus or confusion. With some stubble and a long-coat he'd be lost in the background of any busy Imperium street. Completely unnoticed until he sprang the trap. Then you had an easier time convincing a cyber-mastiff to let you go.

 _It'd probably be more gentle too._ Silas thought.

The vox-speaker rumbled to life over their heads. _"Provost Silas. We're on final approach for Salmica Orbis."_

Janos leaned close and his muddy brown eyes widened in honest astonishment.

Three days of travel had brought the central planet looming before the armorcrys panels wrapping the flight-deck. The vast fleets of Salmica, both commercial and military, threaded the void around it. Fat-bellied merchant-ships formered orderly queues that stretched for thousands of kilometers. Cargo haulers with their boxy holds jostled for space with the fat-bellied whales of Imperial troop transports fresh from the eastern arms of the galaxy.

Silas had seen it all slowly building up, but Janos had been on the asteroid complexes of Hexos for the past seven months worming his way into the heart of the xeno-artifact smuggling ring. This was his first time seeing the gathering of military might for Salmica's Tithing.

Naval cutters and scaled-down destroyers darted among their larger cousins, cruisers and cathedral-tower battleships bristling with lance batteries and macro-turrets. The baroque hulls of battlecruisers and Dauntless class frigates haloed Salmica's white poles, constantly overwatching the stream of freighter traffic.

It wasn't the Cadian Gate, but with the Founding underway it was hard to think of anything short of a full scale armada of Traitor Legions that might be able to make the system worry.

Janos's awed expression schooled back into bland propriety and he nodded his head. "This will be the 453rd Salmican Rifles?"

"457th. Through the 459th " Silas's grimace puckered a bit. "Lord Commander Presedor the Third, in his infinite wisdom, has decided to have a triple Founding. Apparently one of those blasphemous xeno-races are giving the Eastern Segmenta fleets some serious trouble."

"Tyranids," Janos admitted, "I've heard the stories." The shuttle was slipping through the orbital lanes of traffic and docked ships and he eyed one of the naval cruisers their shuttle was skimming past. The sunlight striking gold highlights off its rows of flying-buttress gun-batteries was also illuminating a large gash across its proud deck. Like something had taken a bite out of it.

Something large.

"I don't care if they're overgrown roaches or greenskins, if you can't find three million Emperor fearing citizens willing to do their part without calling in the Arbitrators every week to quell riots, you've got no business being the Planetary Governor."

Civil issues like that were what the PDF and the Enforcers were for. The Arbitrators enforced the Emperor's Law. Their manpower was built around ensuring the Emperor's will was carried out and his laws obeyed, not in being stretched thin across two dozen hives dealing with every minor murder or civil vandalism.

Janos frowned, "You didn't blow my cover in a sector-wide smuggling ring to deal with some disgruntled draftees holed up in a spire."

Silas's expression slowly closed up. Suddenly, he looked his age, and more, a leather-beaten hook-nosed face etched with scars and gristle. "No I didn't," he replied.

Janos waited, but Silas stared ahead as if the most fascinating pict-show was being played across the shuttle's blank screen. That was worrisome.

There was a sealed case secured to Silas's carapace. A message tube with the details of Janos's newest assignment. Silas hadn't opened it, and he wasn't giving Janos anything. It wasn't like Silas to let time go to waste – he preferred his subordinates have as much information as possible and there were always too many demands for the small division of Detectives assigned to Salmica.

That Silas refused to speak of it here meant that the veteran detective-chief was adhering to the rule of law on this one - the first time Janos had ever seen his maverick superior do so.

 _Well, almost the first._

Finally Silas sighed, like air hissing out of a tomb. "It's going to be hard,"

Janos felt a cold pit, a faint echo, pressing down his spine. "Worse than Sigoris?" Just saying the name stirred up old ghosts. Smoking incense and blood and worse.

"Almost certainly." Silas turned and gave Janos a chipped-ice stare. " I need you sharp. Mind open. Understand?"

Faced with that stare, all Janos could do was nod grimly and bury that pit deeper in his gut.

The shuttle began the familiar shuddering dance of breaching atmosphere. Rivets creaked and the armorcrys windows darkened with flames. Both Arbitrators subconsciously mouthed prayers of integrity to the machine-spirit governing the shuttle, but it had no desire for a sudden suicide of promethium flames and wreckage-rain.

The friction fires on the hull outside finished their brilliant burn and faded away. Sunlight warmed Janos's pale face through the armorcrys window and the sky outside the view port was the brilliant blue of a Koronis sapphire. It was the first time he'd seen a breathable sky in seven months. It was the first time he'd worn Arbitrator carapace in seven months. Under different circumstances, Janos almost could have smiled.

Four thousand years as the center of Imperium might and glory in the Helicansubsector had left the upper reaches of Salmica breathtaking. Sky spires glittered like spears of silvered brass. Strong edifices of carved marble, the figures of Imperial saints and heros watched the tiny shuttle from their titanic perches and ecclisiarchical processions marked the morning masses. Green flows across the web of interconnecting bridges marked the sky-gardens and the open-air walkways shimmered with markets and the flow of brightly colored traffic.

The Hyperios Lances, marvels of tech-priest engineering studded the hive's upper walls, huge hyperlas batteries more than capable of smiting any intruder out of the sky with an actinic flare. Their presence highlighted the platinum-crusted ziggeraut of the Adeptus Mechanicus shrine and farther in the distance the gold plateau of the Governor's Palace marked the ultimate excess of space, a palace that thrust out horizontally instead of forced to take up a condensed vertical stack.

Janos didn't blink at any of this. Janos had been low too many times to be dazzled by the glitter this high up. Far enough down, the chrome and platinum turned to rust and corroded iron just like any other spire. But when he saw the stark black slab of adamantite lumber into view, the Arbitrator couldn't stop a small smile from tugging the corners of his lips.

To a passerby the Monulix might have seemed ugly, unseemly, a brooding hulk amongst the roses. To Janos it was the most beautiful thing he ever saw. It stood separate from the glitter, apart from the temptations. The thick walls had the solidness of impregnability, the uncluttered design spoke to a straightforward mindset and Emperor help you if you underestimated that as a simple-mindedness because the Arbitrators were always vigilant.

No speeder traffic hovered around the central precinct, the Monulix had a no-flight cordon a kilometer wide, the only air traffic that circled it were the black hulls of Valkyries or Eagle shuttles like their own and on rare occasion the chrome-crusted speeder of a governmental representative.

Even the planetary governor had to ask politely and schedule his visits ahead of time. Those who didn't risked being expunged quite suddenly from their descendents' gene-pools courtesy of a barrage of armor-piercing flak.

Gun-batteries recessed in the black slab battlements tracked their progress and a pair of fixed-wing Thunderbolts in the black and crimson of Arbites colors flanked their approach, one drifting close enough for a visual inspection of the cockpit and its crew. Janos knew behind the sealed cockpit, the pilot would be issued security challenges and if he didn't countersign correctly, the other Thunderbolt would be hovering high in the sky, read to dive and force the shuttle to the ground.

If the shuttle tried something so foolish as opening fire or trying to evade, the Arbitrator piloting the Thunderbolt could shred it with a quick burp from four nose-mounted autocannons or just paint a lock and let one of eight Skystrike missiles do the work for him.

There were less intimidating commutes to work, but Janos would've been more worried if the pilots had allowed a shuttle to pass through seven security-vigils unchallenged just because it had the correct color scheme on its wings.

The shuttle cleared scrutiny and a minnow sized hole appeared in the Monulix as a hangar bay hatch cranked open.

Landing in the hangar and popping the hatch smelled like a homecoming. Janos and Silas disembarked into a perfume of sharp fyceline mixed with chemical cleaners and the crisp air salting in from the distant sea.

A group of arbitrators trotted past in the cavernous space with the clatter of armored boots and suppressor shields, heading for a Valkyire dropship idling on promethium fumes **.** Shock troops, probably bound for one of the planet's draft-riots.

Fellow troopers and enforcers passed them in the stark rectangular halls as the two left the hangar behind. Some Janos knew by more than notarized names and he nodded. Some even returned his nod. Only a few whispered quietly as he passed, most were disciplined enough to restrict themselves to pointed stares at a slim band of red-painted ceramite lipped below his collar.

Detectives were something of the third-armed stepchild of the Adeptus Arbites family. An Arbitrator dealt in absolutes. Gray areas were anathema to them, but the gray areas were what Detectives had to live in. Sometimes that meant ignoring lesser crimes, sometimes that meant actively participating in heretical activity to secure some criminal or heretic's trust and gain access to the more important targets, the lynch-pins of the operations.

Not many Arbitrators could handle that kind of unlawful elasticity, the record-rolls in the Detective Hall were filled with lists of promising Arbitrators with distinguished service records who'd failed, died, or become the very scum they were pretending to be after working too long, too deep in some undercover role. As a result, the rest of the Arbites tended to regard Detectives with equal amounts respect and suspicion.

"Destination?" Janos asked out of the corner of his mouth.

"Sub-mortuaries.' Silas responded.

Janos nodded as they stepped into a lift at the end of the hall.

The lifts were wide, designed to accommodate two rows of four abreast in carapace plates. Unlike the lifts found in most hab-blocks or civilian spires, these doors were solid slabs that could withstand heavy weapons fire or close tighter than a sealed vault if an unauthorized person – or even more unlikely, armed intruders – attempted to use them to move about the thousand-story complex.

The lifts stopped a dozen time. Janos stepped back to make room for a brusque judge and his etched-leather tome. Another pair of street judges crammed in as well, their armor still chapped from stub-rounds and a cloud of cordite smelled like they'd been practicing shotgun drills in a live-fire exercise.

The Judge he'd moved to make room for was giving the two of them curious glances. He'd noticed the discrepancy between Silas's and Janos's collars. Where Silas's was unadorned red, Janos sported a small black gothic I, with a human eye sigil in its center and a smaller gothic OM above it.

The Judge's body-language changed to something like suppressed panic and he shuffled a little farther away. Janos just kept his gaze fixed straight ahead at the blank doors and didn't acknowledge the slight.

Janos was an Omnicron rank psyker and a sanctioned one. He'd undergone the rites and received the Emperor's Light, but it didn't change the fact that he was afflicted with a mutant gene that at best case scenario gave him access to powers beyond human understanding, and worst case, made him a potential backdoor for a daemonic possession or incursion into the material world.

The judge got off on the next level even though it wasn't the archives. The pair of oblivious street-enforcers trotted off to their barracks. Silas flashed Janos a bemused glance and punched in his override code.

The next fifty levels flashed by much more smoothly until the doors opened on a layer deep beneath the marble covered floors of the upper precinct.

Here there was fewer ornamentation. This was not the display-halls of the upper floors where visitors, whether supplicants or governors, needed to be awed with the grandeur of the Emperor and His servants who enforced His laws.

These were the mortuary levels, only the coroner-morticians and their dead puzzles belonged here. The corridors were gunmetal gray, lit by flickering lumens ensconced across the ceiling. The air was chilled as Salmica's polar poles, and Janos could feel whispers at the back of his mind as they stepped into a small room lined with vaults set into the rockcrete walls.

One of the vaults had been opened and its body pulled out on the metal slab. Silas pulled back the plastek-fiber shroud and gestured at the ruined figure.

Janos had seen plenty of gore. On the scale of disturbing this one ranked in the middle as unique.

The body was still sheathed in a gloss-black bodyglove, something with a strangely shimmering weave to its patterns and multiple zip-pockets that set it apart from the drab charcoal body-gloves favored by the Arbites. There was no Y-shaped scar of a mortician's scalpel saw and the clearly augmetic eye had been left in the skull instead of carefully removed and handed over to the Verispex teams to track down and locate its point of origin.

A gaping hole in the chest of the bodyglove had allowed some sort of acid in and it'd chewed up the flesh from the inside out. At the same time the bodyglove had been tightly fitted. The result looked like someone had stuck a straw in and sucked.

The body's hands and upper arms had been dissolved to yellow-stained bone. Only a few gray strands of ligaments kept the bones together. Several fingers had given up the fight completely and lay in a neat pile along the tray. The face had been flensed as well, patches of yellow bone scraped out from bloody red strands of the muscles that once would have animated the body's face.

Now the only expression left on the corpse was a familiar one. A rictus grin of calcium teeth, the single faded blue eye remaining in its socket. The other had been flushed out completely in the acid soak.

"Am I going to ask the obvious, or are you going to tell me why we haven't done an autopsy yet?"

"I'll let the pict say it all for me." Silas handed over a piece of paper, "Seeing as how the article in question is sealed up tight in an air-vault under triple security vigils."

Janos looked at the pict. One eyebrow raised halfway up his brow, practically a scream of astonishment. "Is this…"

"It's not made out of papermache and glitterbeads if that's what you're asking."

"And he's-"

"As near as we can verify, yes, a dead agent of the Holy Ordos of the Imperial's Inquisition."

Silas unclasped the message tube, and activated the seal it with his gloveless palm. The gene-print clicked the lock open and he extracted a thin ream of parchment, crisp, white, and stained with writing and a holo-matrix seal holding the flickering light engrams of Sector Marshall Castellos Uriah.

"Your orders."

In beautiful gothic script, Sector Marshall Uriah, commander of the Adeptus Arbites of the Helican Sector, had authorized Janos Grenn, Arbitrator Detective third Echelon, a delegation four priority in the investigation and psychic reading of a dead body fished from an underhive pipe.

Somehow, the fact that the body in question was an Inquisitor failed to make the footnote. Janos lowered it carefully and looked at Silas. "This could ruffle some feathers."

"Most likely."

"And the Sector Marshall really thinks-"

"One doesn't risk the ire of the Inquisition on a whim, Janos." Silas grimaced and rubbed at his brow. "Obviously the legal precedent for this is shaky and it wouldn't slow the Inquisition at all if they care to take offense. If you refuse this, I'd say you've got a strong case for doing so. The Sector Marshall wants this kept under wraps, he won't bring this matter into a Judge's hall to be internally reviewed. Under the law, you _can_ walk away from this one with all limbs reasonably intact."

"One question." Janos said quietly. "I'm just an Omnicron. Why not Equila, or Thurxin?"

"Uriah believes you were the only choice."

"And you agree with that decision?" There was a hint of a challenge in his voice.

Silas gave a thin-lipped smile. "I was the one who talked him into it."

Janos stared at the corpse for several moments. He blew out his cheeks and rubbed his chin, thumbing the scar under it. Then he shrugged "Alright then."

Silas exhaled slowly and nodded, "Thank you." He drew his bolt pistol and leveled it at Janos's skull. "Good luck in there." Janos nodded. The mind was the doorway to the soul. Stepping out always ran the risk of having something else step _in._ And if it did, it'd find a bolt-shot eviction notice.

Cold air rushed across his fingers as Janos removed his glove. Psyker talents were a mutation with dozens of different curses. One of the ways Janos's taint manifested was as an ability to glean impressions off of objects or subjects, memories, sounds associated with strong emotions or something the owner had thought frequently or powerfully about.

He rested his bare palm on the ravaged skull like he was about to give a benediction. Flesh-to-flesh made a better conduit and an Omnicron like Janos needed all the help he could get. He focused his will, fanned the ember of his taint, and _blew_.

 _Out._

Janos's breath suddenly plumed white in a way that had nothing to do with the room's chilly air. A sensation of frost crept down his brain and through his arm as psychic phenomena bled through his fleshed fingers to the bared bone of the corpse's skull.

Whispers prickled the air behind his ears. A moan with too many vocal chords drifted out of a sealed crypt-vault. The sealed hatch banged and shuddered and pinprick needles tapped his mind. Frost spread like rot across the walls and Silas's face turned strangely shadowed.

 _Distractions. Feints._ Janos's lips moved, the upper rasping against the lower, murmuring out a warding catechism.

 _Love the Emperor, for He is the salvation of mankind. Whisper His prayers with devotion, for they will save your soul. Love the Emperor, for He is the salvation of mankind. Whisper His prayers with devotion, for they will save your soul…_

The whispers shriveled back. The corpse-memory bloomed forward and suffocated his meager light and-

It was cold. It was dark. He was choking on liquid fire.

Acid splashed his face and sizzled his hands. The pain was exquisite and Janos ignored it, just as he ignored the arms flailing desperately in the liquid feces, and the pulsing agony of his heart punching blood out a hole in his chest. _Those aren't my arms, that's not my flesh melting away into nothingness. It's. Not._

Janos pushed against the memory, straining his will against the ghost-story impregnated in the dead flesh. trying to take in the imagery. It was disjointed, confused, a shattered timelapse of the Inquisitor's last seconds of life, his final sights, his most intense fears.

 _A corpse worm crawling through the gap in an augmetic skull before leering jaws clamp down. Now it's thrashing, pale head peeling back to show lamprey teeth, screeching as its struggles only crush its own body. A wet shlick and half the worm falls with a plop into rushing water, the other half leaks black ichor down yellowed platinum teeth like a chewed off cigar._

He sank deeper into the corpse-memory, finding:

 _A curving tunnel. Liquid condensation with the acrid tang of factory-byproducts. Echoes in the dark. Lumen glowing on a blood red skull with a corpse-worm clenched in its smile, stained on permacrete walls. The worm seemed to writhe in the frizting light. The death-smile seemed to widen. This was the place to - Meet? Hunt? Find?_

 _Die._

 _A click, the lightning flash of fiery cordite backlighting him._ Janos _screamed as his heart ejected into a visceral smear across a wall and he fell into_ _A long, slow tumble into a rushing channel of cold water that burned like fire._

 _Far below, the distant glow of a scraptown tangle. Immediately ahead, the thundering roar of a wastefall. One word before the edge._ _ **Blacknife**_ _. A name? A killer? A place? Then blind eternity, clawing at him, at_ Janos, _dragging him down to share the memory with it, share the corpse, share the fate and-_

Janos's eyes snapped open with a sudden gasp. Something cold and hard was pressed against the back of his skull.

"Janos?"

Janos leaned over the corpse. Something bright and red was staining its skull. Janos touched his nose. "Cloth." His voice was a gaunt whisper. Silas didn't move. Neither did the bolt pistol. Janos squeezed his eyes shut against the pounding agony. "I could recite the _Lex Imperialis_ while holding an aquila if you'd like."

Silas handed him a cloth. Janos staunched the blood dripping out of his nose and wiped a palm across his sweaty brow. He cycled his breath, inhaling and exhaling and when the splitting headache had dulled to a tender knot in his skull he opened his eyes again. "Paper."

Silas handed him a parchment scrap. Janos bent over it and sketched out a symbol. He paused and wrote down a word. After another pause, he added a question mark.

Silas took it from him and studied the symbol. A leering skull with a corpse-worm clenched between its teeth and underneath the word _Blacknife_

"What does it mean?"

Janos shook his head, "I don't know." He admitted.

"What else?"

"He was down in the tunnels...I think to meet someone, maybe that's not the best word. _Encounter_ someone. Something. He was shot from behind. Large caliber. He fell into the water. That symbol and that word had him fixated. Even as the acid was eating into his flesh all he could think about was how he'd failed." Janos shook his head and shuddered. "He wasn't angry he'd failed. He was horrified he'd failed."

Janos took another breath, calming his thoughts, getting them back into order. "Whatever he was pursuing or trying to prevent...it was bad. It was very bad."

The provost sighed, "Did you see any trace of his killer? Anything at all?"

"Nothing. He never saw them."

Silas's "Janos. Think carefully. Was there _anything?_ "

Janos shook his head slowly. "No...Silas, what's going on?"

Silas's face crumpled into a scowl. He glared at the corpse and shook his head. "We didn't perform an autopsy but Verispex techs pulled fragments of a shell from the fiber around the entry hole. We were able to match it. Quickly match it. He was killed by an Executioner shell."

Janos paused. He opened his mouth. He said, "Oh."

Janos was familiar with Executioner shells, and intimately aware of their lethality. Once a target's bio-spoor had been locked in, they were dead the moment the trigger got pulled. The seconds in between were just a formality.

An Executioner round would roll around obstacles and walls, zip between the press of bodies in a crowded street. Guided unerringly by the machine-spirit inside, nothing would it stop it from hitting its target and nothing short of solid carapace would even blunt its armor-piercing tip.

It was rare and expensive, only the Tech-Priests knew how to mate machine-spirit to ammunition like that and they supplied sealed crates of it to only one organization on Salmica Orbis. The Adeptus Arbites.

Silas gave Janos a grim little smile. It was almost sympathetic. "You asked why you? Now you know. For the past seven months you've been on an asteroid halfway across the system. You're the only one who's not a suspect."


	3. Chapter 3

Keller huddled and clutched her knees to her chest. Her autopistol had been removed. Her coat, the flak vest underneath, her filter-plugs and mask, they'd stripped everything from her and left her in a penitent's sackcloth smock. The smock was too small, it bunched up around her knees and she shuddered as her bare thighs froze on the cold stone

Nothing was right, everything around her was too big, too clean, too _empty_. Air you couldn't taste. Fans you couldn't hear. An impossible blue emptiness studded with a forest of silver spire-tips in a distance bigger than the void around the Plunge. She was glad there were no windows. She was scared the Arbites would put some in.

As it was, even the cell was too big. It was a flat featureless box of polished gray stone. There was a bedfoam on the floor, a waste-box in the corner, a shower fixture in the other corner. Meals came twice through a slot in the adamantium door. Keller didn't know how long she'd been in this cell. There were no windows and no chrono. She was too scared to marr the polished walls with scratch-tallies.

At first Keller had damned Daro for his sudden case of stick-up-the-ass. Then she'd grudgingly damned herself because it'd been her eyes that got them into this mess in the first place. Finally as the meals kept coming and the door stayed shut, Keller prayed to the Emperor that Daro wasn't dead. That someone was still alive. That she hadn't been forgotten.

When the hatch suddenly slammed open, she wished she had been.

The low-hive enforcer jumped, almost sprung a leak too. Habit made her reach for an autopistol that wasn't there. Taken along with everything else. Like an insect scuttling in a box, Keller had plenty of space to run, but nowhere to actually hide as an armored figure strode into the cell.

The Arbitrator was covered head to toe in thick plates of carapace armor. They gleamed polished-black in the lumen lights. A gloss-red collar lipped his torso-plate, a black squiggle cut through the red. A heavy-caliber autopistol was holstered to one hip. A power-maul swung from the other. His hand ignored both and instead lifted up a data-slate with the gold fisted-scales symbol of the Adeptus Arbites.

"You are Patroller-Constable Helia Keller of the Enforcer barracks on el-vee twenty-two-forty, section thirty-five alpha." His voice was cold "Stand."

Her mouth felt dry. Desiccated. Keller swallowed and found her knees. "S-Sir." She had had days to think about what she'd say when someone finally talked to her. All those words withered and died away under that black-visor stare.

"Do not salute. In here you are not a patroller constable. You are a prisoner. A witness. Possibly a heretic."

Keller stared at him in disbelief. "N-no! There's - _m'lord_ \- we secured the scene and voxxed it in, that's all, swear on the Golden Throne!" She was babbling, babbling worse than a fresh-meat after their first fog-fight, but terror kept the words coming. "W-where's Daro? Ask him, he'll tell you- "

The Arbitrator raised his armored hand, cutting off her protests."Daro Mund's status is not your concern, Helia Keller. And for the record, I have not asked you a question yet. Do not speak until I do."

That tone. That tone scared Keller. Not angry, or bored, just _uncaring_. It scared her more than any ganger spitting and snarling into her filter-mask.

"As you willingly came forward, the usual round of pre-questioning has been waived. That said, wasting the time of an Arbites is punishable under the _Lex Imperialis_. If I believe you are lying to me or attempting to mislead me in any way, the waiver is rescinded and the next person that comes through that door will be a Chastener."

The Arbitrator paused and his helmet tilted. "You will not enjoy that experience. Your body certainly will not. Fear for your soul and cooperate and you will have been of service to the God-Emperor." His voice was as flat and featureless as polished permacrete. As hard too.

Keller's head jerked in a frantic nod. She thought that'd be an easy demand. It wasn't.

The questions he asked weren't simple. He asked about that night and he asked about every moment of it. Had anything unusual happened before they answered the lamplight summons. _Why_ had they answered the lamplight summons. Was it usual for dredgers to coordinate with the enforcers in such a fashion. He showed her symbols displayed on his data-slate and asked her if these meant anything to her. Was she _sure._ Look _again._ What about Blacknife?

"Who?" Keller gasped. Her mind was in a whirl, racing desperately just to keep up with him.

"Blacknife."

Keller tried to come up with something, anything to give the Arbitrator. Maybe it was a ganger name or a back-alley on the Clog. He pressed her again and she crumbled, terrified that her guessing might be read as lying. The Arbitrator didn't show if that angered or pleased him. The slice of flesh under his nose-guard might as well have cast out of adamantium.

The Arbitrator moved on to more questions that Keller hopelessly tried to answer.

Consider her partner. Had he acted strangely. Was it usual among the Enforcer patrollers to bypass proper communication protocols. No? How had he coerced the other Enforcer's cooperation. Did she really think he was interested in something as trite as _Obscura?_ Be honest. Now, when she found the Inquisitor…

And on. And on. And on. He kept returning to the beginning, jumping to the middle. Keller had questioned plenty of scum on her patrols. She didn't fare any better then they did.

Keller was terrified of speaking, terrified of not speaking too. She would've given the Arbitrator anything to make the questions stop, make him _satisfied_ but she couldn't give him the truths he was looking for and so the questions continued, making her repeat her story and her answers time after time until it all blurred together.

Ages passed. Maybe minutes. Maybe hours. By the end of it, the low-hive enforcer was openly sobbing. Barely able to work words through her cracked-voice mouth. _"I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Please, I don't_ know _._ "

Finally the grim lines around the Arbitrator's mouth softened by an infinitesimal degree. He unsnapped his right glove and drew it off his hand. He extended it towards her. It was the first sign of humanity she'd seen from any Arbites.

Keller hesitantly took it and shuddered. His grip was cold as ice. "One final question," The Arbitrator's hidden face cocked to one side. "You are certain the name Blacknife means nothing to you."

Keller shook her head in dumb exhaustion. "...no…" Her throat felt cracked, bleeding. His grip tightened. The ice sucked the warmth out of her skin, stained her very soul with cold. She felt like an insect transfixed in the middle of a lumen beam.

"Your cooperation has been noted."

The grim finality in that sentence jerked her gaze up. Keller looked at him, trying to see his eyes, trying to read her fate, the _what happens now?_ All she saw were her own tear-swollen features staring back at her in that smoked-glass visor. The Arbitrator released her frozen hand. His boots echoed in the cavernous cell.

"No wait, please! I can - I can still be useful! _PLEASE-_ " her throat gave out in jagged stabs of pain. Keller clutched it and coughed. The hatch slammed shut behind the Arbites. Like the final block in a grave-pit.

Keller melted to the ground. Her smock rode up to her thighs and she clutched her bare knees in desperate silence.

* * *

Janos stepped into the darkened observation oubliette and sealed the door behind him. He took off his helmet and shook his head. "She's a dead end sir."

Silas looked up from the crowded display of pict-screens and sensor readouts. The glows cast deep shadows on his face in the dark room. "You're certain?"

"As certain as I can be with an Omnicron rating sir." Janos flexed his fingers back into his glove. "I pummeled her until her thoughts were off-balanced and unguarded, then I skimmed her. I didn't pick up any strong impressions from _Blacknife_ or the skull icon, only ignorance and confusion. She broke even faster than the other one and her story stayed consistent under the cross-examination. She's telling the truth."

Silas nodded. "Alright. Give her a few hours to recover her voice, then turn her over to the chasteners. At the worst, they corroborate your findings. At best, they loosen something out of her that we've both missed."

"You really think they will?"

"As the Book of Law says: _'Through thoroughness, heresy is brought to light, plots unraveled, treachery averted.'_ " Silas quoted dryly. He sighed and shook his head, "Probably not, but now's not the time to be trusting without verification." Silas shook his head, "Besides, we need to show a little cooperation with our sister-branches. The chasteners are already displeased by having to withhold the pre-questioning rites. They don't like being sidelined from doing their duty."

 _Or letting the amateurs go first_. Janos shrugged. "Sorry sir. Head wounds and coherency don't mix."

"I'll advise they keep their power-mauls on low then." Silas's tone was just as dry.

Janos nodded and replaced his helmet. He was just turning on his boot-heels to leave when Silas's voice called him back.

"Janos." Silas continued studying the window. "One more thing." He didn't turn to look at Janos. His words were quiet and meant for the detective's ears alone. "Agyn knows you're back."

"Ah." A wonderful word, _ah_. It could mean all sorts of things. "You say that like it should mean something sir" he said mildly.

Silas snorted and turned away. "Don't play the dumb recruit." He eyed Janos sharply. "There's... _concerns_ that some of the provosts are having. About Uriah's decision to investigate the Inquisitor's death. About who we've picked to do the investigation. I expect one of them accidentally let it slip." His tone was heavy with sarcasm.

"You knew there were going to be concerns." Janos pointed out. He stared through the glass and studied the prisoner. All he saw was a head of black curls resting on folded knees.

"Hmph." Silas snorted. "Concerns are one thing. Accidents are another."

Janos turned around and stared at him. "I''ve been given a level four delegation signed by the Sector Marshall himself to investigate a dead Inquisitor who may or may not have been killed by a fellow Arbitrator." For the first time, the arbitrator-detective grinned. His teeth flashed blue in the glow of the holopict panels like a plasma-lined ghost. "Sir. With all due respect...accidents _will_ happen."

* * *

The servitor's lower body had been plugged into a data-throne. A metal shell covered the top of its face. Thick cables sprouted out from a bundle at the back to join it to the banks of cogitators. Its veins were necrotic black, its fingers ended in brass needles, and out of its mouth came the whispers of madness:

"-Found 'em on Blacknife Row, just ten cred a stick-"

"- _Blacknife's Plunge_ to Depot Station 22-X, requesting docking clearance-"

"-Heard Blacknife's gotten tired of getting nicked, gonna sign up with those guardie recruiters after all-"

"- _Blacknife's Plunge_ , docking permitted-"

"- Blacknife's Arsenal for the pious at heart. Protect yourself from outhab crims and underspire muties with the finest stub-guns-"

"-BLACKNIFE! Exotic Entertainment! Wicked Sogs! We got the best joylies cause they got the best pus-"

"Cease vocal recitation." Janos took a sip of caff from a paper cup. The servitor fell mercifully silent. Judging by the crude skull tat on its withered neck, this servitor had formerly been a ganger scum or a minor heretic. Now his body worked off the debt his deviant mind had put on his soul. Endlessly scribing the words fed into it by the surveillance taps all across the spire.

The detective sighed and set aside another data-slate. If Janos was going to describe the surveillance archives of the Monulix to a new cadet, he'd begin with a shaft vast enough to house a Dauntless cruiser if it landed nose-up. Layer this shaft with dozens of levels, populate each level with floor to ceiling stacks of data-archives and cogitator banks and holopict screens spilling ghostly green light. On every level, project rows upon rows of data-thrones with plugged in servitors and empty workstations between the human-shaped cogitators to house Arbites, Verispex analysts, and Mechanicus trained tech-seers like a colony of black-armored, white-bodygloved, and red-robed ants.

That might start to paint the picture of what it took to monitor an entire spire. Hammers were useless if you couldn't find the nails that needed flattening which was why the Arbites maintained surveillance feeds on virtually every form of communication. In a spire of over 95 million souls,God-Emperor fearing and otherwise, ambitious didn't begin to describe such an undertaking. Stubborn insanity might come closer.

There were vox-taps for the commercia guilds, noble houses, and orbital stations. Listening horns and servo-skulls for the public plazas, worklifts, and alley-apertures where low-level civilians congregated and tried to pass themselves off as the Emperor's law-loving citizens. Entire shafts wide enough to hold planet-crusher shells were filled with nothing but data-arks, loaded and dusty, running parallel to rolls of recorded parchment thick enough that if you tossed one off the top of the Monulix it'd still be unrolling when it hit the ground a thousand stories later. There were archived transcripts dating back centuries. Entire division of data-clerks spent their lives running down parchment copies, switching out data-arks, adjusting holo-readouts, separating the 90% of junk-chatter from the 10% of sedition.

Janos had himself and two-dozen or so Arbites whose security ratings had been approved by Silas. Some might call that slow going. Others would understand that stubborn insanity was the order of the day.

 _Blacknife_ itself produced a sea of results, but none of them were recorded as belonging to a cult or a major heretic and the word itself was so generic it could be linked to anything. It could literally be a black knife, it could metaphorically refer to the darkness and stealth tactics of a heretical death-cult of assassins stalking the undercity. Apparently, it could even be a street name.

His notes from the past three days were cross-linked to numerous dossiers. He'd checked out and loaded more data-slates than a convoy of scholars. They were starting to look just as rambling too.

It was the same for the skull symbol. A thousand and one different gangs, cults, and military units. There was the 257th Salmican Rifle "Death-Worms" who'd died down to the commissar on Procopius during an Ork WAAUGH! forty-three years ago. There was the Helix of Blessed Binary, a Tech-Priest minor shrine that had been noted for biological studies before being subsumed by the underspire centuries ago. And there were the cults, _Throne_ , were there the cults:

 _The Bone-Children, the Heralds of the Primal Scream, the Blood-Cheeks of the Horned and Flaming Skull, Shadow-Takers, Skull Feasters, Curatorix of Flesh and Form, Servants of the Flaying Worms, Followers of the Following Dark, Followers of the Summoning Dark…_

The cults alone took up ninety-two pages and these were just the ones that had been recorded into the data-arks as having a motif similar to the one Janos had scribed. The image of something rising, nesting, or hiding within the purified shell of the most holy shape of the human form was almost as ancient as the blasphemous 8-pointed star.

This was like being given two pieces of straw and ordered to find the right haystack on an agri-world. Janos fortified himself with another sip of caff, then the servitor beside him began to twitch and jerk into unnerving seizures.

" **+++Error+++Error+++Error+++"**

The servitor's head shuddered, skeletal jaws clamped and bit. Drool crept out of its mouth and stained its naked chest. After a moment, the brass skull jerked back up and the data-quills started whirring again, but now it just kept writing **+++Blacknife+++** over and over.

"Bloody Throne." Janos cursed and thumbed a button-stud built into the table. The help rune above the table lit up red. Minutes later a techseer floated towards him, mechadendrites skiffing under red-robes, and formed the sign of the cog with its hands.

"What is the malfunction?"

"This data-servitor has become unresponsive." He resisted the urge to say _again._

The tech-acolyte adjusted his glowing red monocle, the only augmetic Janos could visibly see.

"The machine-spirit is locked in a cycle of cogitative confusion. Do not worry this is a common malady." He started pulling out pinches of metal shavings and uncorking vials that filled Janos's nose with the sharp, head-turning fumes of blessed machine-oils.

The fumes were starting to turn his head. Janos stepped out into the narrow aisle running between the workstation rows.

"3rd Echelon Arbitrator-Detective Grenn?"

Janos turned and found a thin man in a Verispex's white body-glove waiting for him. The Verispex saluted, making the Adam's apple on his throat bobble dangerously.

"Arbitrator Grenn wastes the fewest words," Janos replied, "Your pardon…"

"Lead Verispex Rossum, honored Arbitrator."

 _Ah._ One of the Verispexes Silas had recommended. Janos had tasked them with augering the Inquisitor's body and equipment before an autopsy. "Well, Lead Verispex, what can I do for you?"

Verispex Rossum swallowed. "We found him."

Janos frowned. There was only one _him_ the Verispex could be nervously referring to and if that was the case he was too damned early. Janos had left them with a task as impossible as his own, pulling a gene-print off the corpse and running it through the Ministorum of Travel's Entry & Departures.

"You found a name for the body?"

"Ah, yes sir."

"A body who could have come off of any one of the ten million shuttles or tramp-freighters that enter and leave Salmica Orbis each day, from any point of time spanning the last several years or decades."

"10,000,357 to round up from the decimals sir. Daily entries and departures I mean."

Janos wasn't going to get excited. He really, really wasn't. "How?"

"Gun oil." Rossum said.

"Gun oil." Janos repeated.

"Yes. Gun oil." Rossum's face was entirely serious. Janos usually had an inkling for when his leg was getting yanked. He nodded slowly.

"Your pardon Verispex. I'm just a detective. Illuminate me. Start with the gun oil because I don't recall seeing a gun collected with him."

Rossum shook his head quickly. "No Arbitor, it was in one of the zip-heads. The vials had been crushed by his flush through the pipes, but we were able to extract a pure sample - the pockets were liquid sealed- and we cast our augeries upon the collected oil."

"Where you quickly deduced it was gun-oil."

"Yes. Specifically, an oil of preservation. Conditions in the waste-districts are unusually corrosive. You need to keep weapons oiled constantly down there, and there are specialized secretions that are only acquired locally. It's not something off-worlders would think to account for-"

"-Or think twice about purchasing." Janos responded. Something strange was starting to coil in his gut. It wasn't excitement. Truly.

"Precisely. What most outside the business don't realize is that each oil has a specific composition. The variation _is_ minor, but each one stays unique based on how it was processed, where it was distilled, even what glass it was stored in. We analyzed micrometric disposition of molecules, chemospectral dispersal of pheromones-"

Janos held up his hand. "Again. Apologies. Speak like I don't have a comprehension of the specifics of your augury rituals."

The verispex flushed and bowed his head in apology. "Sorry sir. We processed the sample through a micro-scopular divinator. The specific oil is Kaldus No.35, refined in the deep-down distilleries of the Kaldus Guild of Armatures and marketed only from their weapons estates on LV 7238. That narrowed our search parameters from ten million to under seven-hundred and twenty-three."

"And you were able to match a gene-print to the oil purchase?"

Rossum blinked. "No, that's impossible. They don't do gene-print thumb seals for that. We pulled the match off the order for bolter shells."

"The bolter shells?"

"Two thousand rounds. .75 caliber. Hand tooled by Kaldus artificers. The honored merchant-baron recalled the purchase. He thought it was for some House's personal bodyguard servitor or a naval-dynasty patriarch. So he found it curious that the address in question was a midspire hab-block on 5543."

Janos slowly leaned back and scrapped the stubble on his cheek. "Let me summarize. Gun oil in the corpse's pocket led you to a shop on the Commercia that matched a gene-print between the corpse and a purchase order of enough military-grade ammunition to hold a five minute war. The destination of all this ordinance is a discrete hab-block in the midspire that would not belong to anyone authorized to _have_ such ammunition in the first place."

"Well sir, the merchant-houses take the purchase pledge very seriously. Client discretion is a part of their religion. We had to threaten Judge junior-acolytes combing through the legalities of their practices before they'd surrender the pict-feeds, let alone a name."

Verispex Roussum presented the data-slate. It wasn't a flourish. It was the grim thrust of a hand clutching the last grenade after a long and grueling battle. "Gavinski Sartath."

Janos took the slate.

He knew Gaviniski Sartath would be just a cover identity, but it would serve as a placeholder better than Inquisitor _[Unknown]_. Just as the face in that grainy color-pict would serve well being draped over the yellowed skull and corroded body down in the mortuary.

It wasn't the face he'd expected. Much older. Distinguished. White bands streaking gray hair, a patrician's sculpted features that only surgical remolding or damn good genetics could deliver. A dynasty grandfather or retired Schola instructor, perhaps. But there was something in the whip-thin shoulders, the set of the eyes. A bland complacency that would've twigged Janos's auspex array even without knowing he was an Inquisitor. Predators were good at recognizing one another.

Janos looked up at Rossum. "See what else you can pull up. Use the name and see if he used it when he arrived to Salmica, that will begin to give us an idea of how long he was here before he died."

Rossum nodded and turned to leave. "And Verispex Rossum." The spindly man turned around with a look of confusion and Janos nodded, "Good work."

Rossum grinned.

While he'd talked to the verispex, the techseer had finished with the malfunctioning servitor. It put a last vial away into its pouch and turned to Janos. The augmented human waved off his thanks with an indifferent sign of the Cog. "Thanks should be directed to the Omnisiah. It is what grants us the sacred knowledge to understand and commune with these machine-spirits."

With that, the techseer left, floating away to respond to some other desperate plea for help.

Janos stepped back into the alcove and made sure the techseer had vanished before he discreetly fanned some lingering incense fumes away.

At least the servitor had stopped drooling. It sat poised before the parchment rolls, needles clacking, ink-tips seeping. Janos tore off the old parchment and stared at it. A long line of _**Blacknife+++Blacknife+++Blacknife**_ tracked down the sheet. In places the needles had pressed hard enough to rip through and spatter ink everywhere. The servitor had managed to ruin a yard of parchment with it before the techseer fixed it. Janos snorted at the waste and shoved it to the end of the desk, dropping his helmet down on it to keep it from springing up.

Janos sank down into the chair and distractedly stared at Rossum's report. The bolter shells...the bolter shells bothered Janos. Not the fact that the Inquisitor had been able to purchase them so easily - Janos was well aware of how quickly the rules of law broke down behind the sealed doors of a merchant-estate.

But procuring that much ammunition…Inquisitor Sartath had been gearing up for major opposition. If that was the case, then why hadn't he reached out to the Arbites? They could have supplied him with strike teams, vehicles, equipment, local knowledge. Arbites reputation for faith and service to the Imperial creed was legendary. They should have been the Inquisitor's first choice if there was a threat in the underhive.

 _Why hadn't he reached out indeed?_ Janos scratched his cheek. The obvious answer was fragmented around the Inquisitor's chest cavity. Obvious answers made Janos uneasy. They were too easy to plant.

He sighed and pressed the command-rune. The servitor quivered to life."Surveillance search. Identity handle _Gavinski Sartath_. Priority on full-hits, include partial hits as appropriate. Transcribe all logs of communication by descending date." Janos double-checked his command and nodded, "Execute." This time it wasn't a smooth flow of data-quills. The needles quivered and stalled, writing a word there or a fragment here. Janos wasn't surprised to find _Gavinski_ _Sartath_ was proving more scarce than _Blacknife._

He pulled out his data-slate and started penning a search-script request to Silas for the address the verispex had pulled. Silas would have to get it approved by Uriah, but the level four delegation meant Janos had top-of-the-basket priority when it came to processing requests. Janos reached out and put his thumb to the hololithic screen.

Instincts more than awareness saved him.

Something flickered in the reflection of his visor and Janos kicked his chair back before he could latch onto what was wrong. A spider-like hand filled his vision then flashed past in a lance of pain. Five data-quills embedded deep into the plas-foam table. Another five swung towards him. Janos tucked into his shoulder pauldron, clapped his arm over his face as he fell to the ground.

Needles splintered and bones cracked. The carapace plates held firm. Janos slammed to the floor. His hand clapped the butt of his Vindus-pattern autopistol and the heavy-caliber gun snapped free of its mag-lock. The servitor loomed above him, framed in the light of a ceiling lumen. Black ink dribbled from the broken data-quills of its mangled hands as its upper body lunged towards Janos-

\- only to jerk back short. The servitor's eyeless skull whisked to the data-throne it was still coupled to, whisked back to the _click_ of Janos's autopistol disengaging the safety. Its mouth burst open in a sudden scream of white-noise filth and machine-static.

The Vindus roared louder, three flashes of bright fire.

The servitor thudded against the table in a shower of sparks. Oil and machine fluids guttered from its neck stump. The oil slowly rolled over the table, ruining scattered printouts, seeping under data-slate casings. Janos slowly got up, heart hammering in his ears, and touched the burning sensation under his eye. His glove came away slick with blood. He realized he was still pointing the gun at the headless servitor. He also realized its needles were still clacking and spasming with a slice of his skin skewered between them.

On the parchment on the table, the last row of **+++Blacknife+++** rippled and vanished under the shimmering dark.


End file.
